The headline of this post sounds like true click bait. I know! It really isn’t, though, because leveling up your business is exactly what I’m talking about. So bear with me. I want to try something different. Instead of talking about Git, I want to talk about business. I love business. I love talking about businesses and I love running a business. So today we are going to talk about – business! If it works, I will keep doing it once in a while, and if not… Well, let’s hope it works! Let me know what you think in the comments or by sending me an email.

Push-to-Deploy is the feature of WP Pusher that will keep your WordPress websites up-to-date every time you push some fresh code to your Git repositories. In this post, we are going to take a look at what Push-to-Deploy is, how best to use it for an effective workflow.

Last week I wrote a guest post over on the WP Tavern about how fundamental Git is for WordPress teams. In the post, I mention 3 signs that will make it obvious to me that your WordPress development team is not in fact working as a team – but rather as small 1-man teams. The 3 signs are:

Lack of version control

Lack of a code collaboration platform

Lack of a deployment strategy

Git is a fundamental enabler of team work, so without it, it’s hard to get to step 2 and 3 in that list. If you want to read the article, check it out over on WP Tavern.

As part of the Git for WordPress video course, Danny van Kooten shows how he uses Git to release a new version of his plugin MailChimp for WordPress.

Danny van Kooten is the founder of Ibericode and the creator of MailChimp for WordPress, one of the most popular WordPress plugins on WordPress.org. I have known Danny for a while and I know he has a pretty solid workflow, so I reached out and asked if he would like to share it, which he agreed to. Thank you, Danny!

I think it is fair to say that pull requests were made popular by GitHub and their brilliant implementation of the concept. Used in a strategic way, pull requests are a very powerful collaboration tool to have in your toolbelt – especially if you work in a team.

There’s a question I get quite often about WP Pusher and that is: “do you handle updates to the database as well?”. The answer to that question is “no”. WP Pusher is meant as a tool to deploy code changes to plugins and themes that are under version control with Git. I always tell people that they should take a look at the Migrate DB Pro plugin instead, since it does exactly that. Recently, I started talking to Brad, the creator of Migrate DB Pro and guess what he told me: Just as people ask me if WP Pusher can deploy database changes, people ask him if Migrate DB Pro can deploy source code changes. See where I’m going with this?

Today, version 2.0.0 was released. The main reason for the bump in versions from 1.1.8 to 2.0.0 was due to a few breaking changes that I felt was necessary to introduce. Please take a moment to read this post to stay up-to-date on what is new.

Yesterday, I was watching the WP Sessions stream, where Josh Pollock talked about developing WordPress plugins using Composer. Josh did a great job introducing Composer basics, however, I still feel a need to comment on one specific point that was missing in the presentation: Loading 3rd party dependencies with Composer doesn’t change the fact that WordPress isn’t designed to handle 3rd party dependencies in plugins.